I still have my misgivings about this series, and yet I still want to keep reading it. Granted, some of my misgivings are silly, like “what is up with all these ugly variant covers from old 90s promo shoots?” Some are a little more serious, like “why did you kill off the Lone Gunmen if they are just going to have to come back because you realized you needed an unaffiliated super awesome hacker squad to leap over plot holes?”

For the Philes who love ‘The X-File’s for Mulder/Scully, this issue will make you immeasurably pleased. There is a kiss! Well, sort of… it wasn’t really Mulder, but she thought it was! Oh, and Scully mentioning that Mulder is the most important person to her in the whole world, even over her son. So… for the shippers out there, this is a good issue.

For the rest of us, it’s an interesting issue. It involves wily-shapeshifters and Dana Scully not losing her cool until… oh when she totally loses her cool and shoots Mulder.

Wait, what?

Right, that’s what shapeshifter issues are like. They are confusing but they are always dramatic, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I quite like this issue.

I’m still not terribly fond of them telling me what happens in the first two pages before it actually happens because it jars me out of the story, but on the whole… it was fun. That being said, I’m a little done with the Scully-suffering at this point. I get it. She’s strong. She’s capable. She’s hurt. But as each issue focuses disproportionately on her, and her kidnapping and violence, I’m feeling Scully-torture-sickness.

Really, there isn’t much else to say. It’s very ‘X-Files’-y, and I say that meaning it has a lot of plot twists and improbable areas of distance traversed in the course of what feels like half a day. It’s like a road trip for the mind with supernatural events, and it’s issues like this that remind you that ‘Supernatural’ was influenced very heavily by ‘The X-Files’.

Still, despite Scully-torture, and somewhat jarring time jumps, I shall give this issue a well deserved:

THE X-FILES SERIES 10 #4 Written by Joe Harris and Chris Carter Art by Michael Walsh